


i will touch this tender wall, until i know i'm home again

by Angyie



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Artist Steve Rogers, Canonical Character Death, De-Serumed Steve Rogers, F/M, Found Family, Gen, Identity Issues, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Minor Steve Rogers/Sam Wilson, Multi, Platonic Soulmates, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, References to Depression, Slight Body Dysphoria, Slight Suicide Ideation, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, Steve Rogers Feels, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Steve Rogers and the 21st Century, Steve Rogers-centric, Steve Rogers/Tony Stark if you want, Survivor Guilt, steve rogers and that big heart of his are going to be the death of me, that's it that's the fic, this is my love letter to steve and the mcu now that endgame is out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-30
Updated: 2019-05-30
Packaged: 2020-03-20 07:14:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18987838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Angyie/pseuds/Angyie
Summary: Steve’s long life and many people, the map of soulmate marks all over his skin, and how he was born in a small body that couldn’t hold all of his heart.(or: Steve Rogers loves, unconditionally, without limits, and all they have to do is to watch him self-destruct.)





	i will touch this tender wall, until i know i'm home again

**Author's Note:**

> welcome to my love letter for Steve Rogers (and I definitely don't cry about him about ten times a day), now that his story has been completed in canon, which kinda became a love letter to the mcu in some ways.
> 
> you can honestly read this with the ship goggles you desire (or none at all) because it's all for interpretation. even Steve and Bucky, they're pretty intense (that's Steve and Bucky for you) but it can be platonic if you want, the main point is that Steve loves, So Much, and it doesn't matter if it's romantic or not  
> which brings me to my next point is that there are Endgame spoilers in this so beware of that, and I guess you could consider it a fix-it in some ways because I'm part of the gang that refuses Steve's ending (and that's coming from someone who adores Steve/Peggy). that's not character development that's character regression sir, he had built his life in this century you absolute Fools
> 
> (Steve/Sam is pretty much implied to be on the same level and Steve/Bucky and Steve/Peggy, I just didn't tag it because it's not the focus - maybe for the next time~ also, Steve/Tony can be a thing if you want it to, do your thing, have fun)
> 
> don't forget to read the tags because some themes might be upsetting to some of you.
> 
> one last thing, English ain't my first language, so I'd like to thank my non official beta for their hard work, [green_piggy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/green_piggy/pseuds/green_piggy), go check out their stuff!

**i.**

 

“That boy of yours is a problem if I’ve ever seen one,” the neighbors would say to Sarah Rogers, probably after the fifth fight of the month between the kids of the neighborhood.

Steven Grant Rogers is barely six years old, is as tiny as a four year old child and without a doubt thinner and as fragile. He wears an impressive set of bruises on his face, comes home ashamed and hurting, but with an earnest plea that the other kids weren’t being nice and he couldn’t let them bother little Joseph Clayton like that on the playground.

“My boy just has a big heart,” Sarah Rogers would always answer, hands on her hips, raising her eyebrow with a smile. It’s not an excuse or an apology; it’s a challenge and just the simple but stunning pride of a mother who’s watching her frail son battle for every second of his life, and he’s still winning. They told her with pity that he was born too early, he’s too small, he hasn’t breathed in the first few minutes of his life like he should have, he’s not going to survive the first week, our condolences ma’am. But her son pushes his limits further and further, and he’s going to show them. He’s not born of Irish blood for nothing, that baby boy of hers.

 

They don’t speak much of soulmates. Marks are just a small drawing on someone’s skin, a sign of God, perhaps, that they share their soul with their should-be lover. They’re little, usually easy to hide and cover. It makes it easy to move on and pretend it’s not there if one wants to. It makes it easy for Sarah to ignore that she doesn’t have one herself and that’s perfectly fine by her. She marries, loves, and grieves a man without a mark either, loses him in the Great War, moves on with a little sunshine in her life. 

So they don’t speak much of it, especially because it’s rare for a child to have one. Even for teenagers, high school sweethearts don’t tend to last long either after all. It’s a surprise when her boy comes back home one day, a bloody point at the corner of his lips again. Steve is strong and doesn’t cry much unless he’s struggling to breathe, so the sight of her son clutching his right arm with tears of agony shakes her to her core.

“Ma, it hurts,” her baby boy whimpers against her neck as he suffers for hours.

Soulmate marks usually hurt when they appear, she knows that much. But she also knows that they’re small, an inconspicuous design on the back of a hand, on a shoulder blade, under the sole of a foot. She watches in dread as for hours, a labyrinth of a pattern etches itself on the entirety of her son’s right arm.

“Am I not normal, ma?” He looks up to her once it’s over, trying to make sense of the design on his skin. All she sees in her boy in pain, scared, and everything about him is so unheard of and _not normal_. She is a mother above it all though.

“No, sweetheart.” She kisses the top of his nose until he giggles again. He is one of a kind, she knows that much now, but also: “You’re a gift.”

 

At the same time, her son’s left leg, from the tips of his toes all the way up his thigh, is starting to show its own signs. When she spots it, Sarah’s heartbeat misses a few stops, which she quickly hides behind a benevolent smile. She urges him to hide it, she doesn’t want him to be cast aside more than he already is. To make it up for it, she kisses him on the nose every single day to show him she loves him all the same.

“Do you wish you didn’t have me, ma?” is the most horrifying sentence to hear for a mother, after all.

Still, she wonders why Steve was born so small if his whole body is going to be covered one day, because there’s not enough room for him to paint on.

 

She meets James finally, immediately sees that that boy is trouble, but perhaps less than her son. Winifred Barnes and her reach a common agreement that they need to hide their marks underneath layers of clothes even during summer, because it won’t be long before someone makes the connection between two marked children - two _boys_ \- as there’s so few of them.

Chuckling, she asks herself if the size of her son’s mark matches the strength and depth of the link between Steve and Bucky.

She can rest easy, though. Her son is in good hands.

 

 

**ii.**

 

When his mother dies of tuberculosis in her hospital bed, Steve spots for the first time a golden sparrow on her stomach. It mirrors his own at the same spot, one that he’s never told her about and managed to hide because his two covered limbs were enough of a concern for her. She always told him she didn’t have a mark and he never knew her to lie, so perhaps she had simply stopped looking at herself altogether to look after him.

From now on though, he knows soulmates aren’t always meant to be lovers. At least in his case, he’s figured out a while ago he doesn’t quite follow the rules like everyone else. He hasn’t figured out if he should be happy about it.

 

They close the curtains tight so their sweet but gossipy neighbor Mrs Werbiński wouldn’t see, and he lets Bucky hold him that night, his knees curled up between their chests. He feels smaller than he even is.

“How does it feel?” Bucky asks as his fingers stop above Steve’s sparrow, not quite daring to actually touch it. It’s all grey now. The golden tint is gone.

“Like I’m missing something in there.” Steve taps his heart with a sigh, burying his face against Bucky’s neck.

Bucky stays silent for a while. Then he shifts them so that Steve rests on his stomach. Their legs are tangled with each other, the sensation of bare skin against bare skin makes Steve shiver. Above all, for the first time, he doesn’t know where _Steve_ stops and _Bucky_ starts as he presses himself more against Bucky’s chest, as Bucky tightens his grip around him. His arm is trembling, but in a reassuring, soul soothing way, one that spreads warmth all inside him.

Bucky’s hand find his mark, comes and goes alongside the length of his thin arm. It sends Steve in a full body shiver that makes Bucky falter, but Steve hums quietly against his neck: “Don’t stop, please.”

So Bucky starts again, traces the lines,  _his_ lines on Steve’s skin. In the ten years or so they’ve known each other, they tried to make sense of them without success, until Steve got fed up of being dissected and pushed Bucky aside, declaring in all Brooklyn and Irish accented glory that he was just a weirdo and it was time to accept it.

On Steve’s skin, Bucky is red. Or at least, that’s what Bucky tells him, because his eyes are blind to most colors. Bucky describes a light shade of red that fades into his skin like they’re one and the same. It’s a mess on his forearm, curves and shapes that spans from his wrist to his elbow. It’s puzzling in some ways. Bucky has spent many hours staring, yet Steve is the artist out of the two of them and beneath the seemingly abstract patterns, he’s the only one who can see the dirty cobbles of Brooklyn, the shapes of ships at the docks where Bucky works at, the silhouettes of all the people who’ve been charmed more than once by an easy-going and blinding smile. It’s full of life and it’s _home_ , all around them and on him.

His upper arm though. At the crook of his elbow, the lines suddenly go straighter, mechanical, with sharp angles as it goes up. Steve would be a liar if he didn’t admit it scared him when he looked at himself in a mirror, because it’s so lifeless, impersonal, whereas Bucky is warmth and everything, a laugh and an arm around his shoulders. They’re still Bucky’s though, and he knows that because they all join up to the star atop of his arm, right under his shoulder.

Bucky’s star is on Steve’s upper arm, a reassuring patch of ink he can touch through his clothes when he needs to stay afloat. Steve’s star is on Bucky’s left wrist where he can feel his pulse. It’s blue like the sea, according to Bucky.

“I’m never gonna let it happen again,” Bucky mumbles against his hair.

Steve thinks about the tiny spot of nothing on his stomach and can’t imagine it spawning and take hold of an entire arm without wanting to throw up, so he presses himself more against Bucky.

“‘Til the end of the line, Stevie.”

 

Sometimes, when Steve comes home to their cramped flat, barely enough room for them to navigate through, he collapses on the doorstep. If Bucky has come home from the docks, he’s always there to catch him; otherwise, Steve is light enough for him to pick up and lay him down on his bed.

There’s nothing much he can do. Bucky is starting to see a pattern here. He’s an eternal shadow at Steve’s side that can only protect him from so much. He can’t do shit against Steve himself, because he knows for a fact that it’s the sole of Steve’s foot all the way to his thigh that is ignited. Curves and shapes for each person who looks fondly at the paper boy doing his round around the neighborhood every day.

All the tints of Brooklyn find their way on Steve’s left side. For their sweet neighbor that cooks up a feast on Christmas for the people in the building who don’t have the money or the family for it. She slides more food than they can hope to get in an entire week in Steve and Bucky’s plate. From Mrs Koenig and her twin boys downstairs, to old Mr Veloso a few streets away that everyone fondly takes care of ever since his wife died and he's never been quite the same, Dolly Clayton who giggles when she teasingly kisses Steve’s cheek. Russell from the boxing ring and his little brother who always wants to watch Steve sketch the banks of the East River, until there’s a bunch of kids pressing around Steve’s form on the grass. Even Bucky’s sister Rebecca finds her place on Steve’s skin.

There’s no sign of pain in Steve’s eyes when he treads through the busy streets. No, he _shines_ , so bright despite the sole of his foot tracing new strokes at every step, every familiar face he greets.

“I ain’t nothing special, Buck,” Steve pouts when Bucky carries him home again, when it’s all too much.

“Hate to break it to you, but your eyes can’t see shit, Stevie.”

 

Bucky leaves for Europe. Steve’s mind is just filled of the earth shattering moment of his mother’s last breath, so he prays every day that the red doesn’t become grey, but there’s nothing he can do here. 

He keeps trying to enlist until it works.

 

Agent Carter socks a man until he can probably feel shards of the broken bones of his nose all the way to his brain. Just like that, Steve’s left arm carves its own path.

 

He blushes and stutters around Peggy in a way he never has around Bucky. She looks at him with something that isn’t pity or curiosity, but admiration and adoration, not unlike Bucky does. For now though, he’s more familiar with her pristine shoes than her face considering how much he looks away from her face out of shyness.

The day before the procedure, she slips in his barracks while the other soldiers are outside drinking and after Erskine has left. He swallows with difficulty and looks up, completely frozen on the spot. He sees her for the first time, and her professional, precise demeanor has stayed outside on the doorstep; she bites her lower lip, nervous as she sits down with all the elegance Steve wants to draw and immortalize on paper.

“Whatever happens tomorrow, I want you to know I am honored to have known you,” she tells him, not unlike a soldier who knows what it’s like to leave comrades behind, as she opens her impeccable white shirt - Steve stutters even more when trying to stop her, while looking elsewhere, but there’s no stopping Peggy. Her skin is as smooth as pearls, save for a spot on her left arm she unveils when she pushes the cloth away from her shoulder.

Steve’s mark is like numbers, letters, and also arrows pointing to different directions. There is one that stands out, towards her heart. She leaves in a hurry before he can show her his own, but it occurs to him he might die tomorrow, so it’s fair she doesn’t want to think about a missed opportunity for the rest of her life.

 

When he steps out of the pod, the first thing he does is checking that his marks are still there. They are. There’s also more room on himself now. Bigger limbs, bigger chest, bigger back. Perhaps for new people in this new life?

White skin has pierced through the Brooklyn doodles, as well as Bucky’s and Peggy’s, because the drawings themselves haven’t grown in size. It feels a bit empty.

(Erskine’s mark is born at the same time he dies, so he never knows what colour he is.)

Then, this time, he sees more than he feels the colours of his mark fading out. It’s still alive and kicking, so it’s more than enough for him to jump out of a plane in a warzone. For Bucky, he’d do anything.

 

Each of his men of the Howling Commandos gets a mark and that’s when it should have occurred to him his case really isn’t a normal one. For now, they have other preoccupations, namely a goddamn war to finish, so a freak with more marks than he should have and _men’s_ marks? They can deal with that later.

Although they all smile in different ways about how each of Steve’s fingers is branded with them, on the side of his left palm. Dugan plays it off with jokes always louder than the last one, about how the waves on his thumb are God’s cruel way of looking down at his mustache and “only Rogers can have the artistic freedom and _ability_ to make it look actually _good_ ”, Morita roars with laughter. Jim himself is wires tangled around a luxurious looking pen on his index finger. The man gets quiet when he looks at it, but they never mention the letters he sends to the camps holding his own family prisoner on the US soil back home, just because they’re descendants of the enemy.

Gabe is a flower on his middle finger. It folds and blooms with his phalanges around the butt of a gun and he brushes off all the jokes they can make about the delicate sight with all the poetry he reads in his downtime to forget the war around him. Falsworth is on his ring finger, abstract lines Steve can’t make much sense of, but Falsworth laughs with that gentle smile of his and tells him about the woman waiting for him back home. And Jacques, apparently, is the funniest one to them, because he sulks for a few days the first time he sees it. They all can see the proud glint in his eyes though, when they mention the fire fiercely coming out of a cross of Lorraine on Steve’s pinky finger.

“The true embodiment of the French spirit,” Morita laughs.

They all join up in the center of his palm with dotted lines around his shield like branches.

_(“Why don’t I have one, Steve-o,” Howard whines, draping himself across Steve’s back like a leech when he’s sitting at his desk for paperwork._

_“You do, though,” Steve laughs. “Who do you think made that shield?” He swats Howard away._

_“A genius like me, that’s who!”)_

Just like no one really points out that they don’t have a mark for Steve, no one really mentions that Bucky isn’t with them. It’s not hard to make the connection with the huge painting on his arm. Mostly, they turn a blind eye to late nights where Steve and Bucky maybe sit a little too close to each other, their fingertips touching each other’s soul mark, whispering things only they can understand. In another time, without a war at their tail, perhaps they’d have reacted differently. It’s not really their business how a fella tries to make it through another day.

Or perhaps not, because they realize their captain has a heart bigger than he is - and that’s saying something because the man is _huge_ , doesn’t matter what Barnes says about a scrawny shrimp from the playgrounds of Brooklyn. He has a place for them on his body that’s already covered much more than everyone else’s. So, no, it doesn’t really matter why Steven Grant Rogers doesn’t have just one mark meant for Peggy Carter but a myriad, because it makes their unit one of a kind and one that lasts forever in memories.

 _He’s a dumb one, that captain of ours,_ they sing as they march through the forests of Europe under bewildered stares of regular soldiers who wonder if they could be sent to martial court for insubordination. Captain Rogers just rolls his eyes and smiles as he walks alongside them.

_He’s a dumb one, that captain of ours,_

_With a heart too pure for a war,_

_But he’s gonna kick the Germans out of Europe for us all,_

_And kiss the red of Miss Rogers’ lips._

Peggy doesn’t scold them either for that last line, simply sighs and goes forward. Bucky however, starts pulling ranks once he realizes they call him Miss Rogers behind his back when it’s just them. 

“It doesn’t even fucking rhyme,” he groans. Steve bites the inside of his cheek, trying not to point out soldier songs are more about the rhythm than rimes.

They’re _his_ team, he looks at them fondly as he rests his face against his palm around a campfire.

 

“She’s the real deal, huh,” Bucky says one night. They were granted a break by Colonel Phillips, as they found shelter within a Polish village that welcomes them with open arms. Jones managed to find a few empty houses for them. Steve doesn’t really like taking what isn’t his, but war is war and there is a high probability that these people will never come back here, no matter the reasons.

Steve insists for him and Bucky to share a room. He doesn’t know why, but the weight of the war is harsher on him this night, and he finds comfort in sharing a bed with his first soulmate, like oblivious kids hiding from bombs and the world crumbling around them.

“Who?” Steve asks. Bucky snorts, without humour in it, and slaps his bare arm, slaps Peggy’s mismatched arrows on the upper part of his arm, linked together with a fascinating network of abstract lines not unlike music notes and gunpowder. It mirrors Bucky’s star.

“Don’t play dumb with me, Rogers.”

“I…”

Steve hesitates, sits forward.

“You’re still here,” he glances at his other arm, and it’s true. Maybe Steve is normal after all, not a _queer_ the sisters at the church would spit on, and Bucky was just a teenage fantasy that would pass with time. That’s what he used to think at least, because now Bucky’s mark is stronger than ever and Peggy’s is like a new fire blazing through the land.

“I know.”

“I’m not… I don’t…”

“... I know,” Bucky sighs. He learns forward too, their knees touching as they sit on two miserable beds in a tiny room that isn’t theirs, but it’s more than what they’ve had to sleep on for the past few weeks.

“You don’t really get it, do you?” Bucky finally lets out with a pained smile.

“Tell me,” Steve says. He wants to reach out, touch Bucky’s mark like they were kids in a way that would make them giggle until they couldn’t tear away from each other. They’ve changed, Bucky has changed and he’s harder to reach ever since Steve found him strapped on that table.

“When I…” Bucky starts, clears his throat a little. “When I touch you, touch that,” he nods towards Steve’s right arm. “I feel so goddamn good. Like, I don’t know, maybe that religious hogwash from the sisters from the church back home wasn’t so wrong after all, maybe it’s true you’re a part of my soul. I feel whole, Steve, you’re a part of me.”

“I know. That’s how I feel too,” Steve whispers, but Bucky nods, gestures him that he’s not done. He blinks back a few tears and looks at Peggy’s mark with a piercing stare, but there’s acceptance in it.

“When I touch, _her_ , it’s the opposite. I feel like you’re getting further and further away from me and I can never feel like myself again.” He learns forward, only to rest his forehead against Steve’s knee. “Guess I gotta learn how to share then,” he half laughs.

Steve reaches out. His hand falters above Bucky’s hair until the man himself grasps his hand and closes the gesture. “I can’t ask you that, Buck, that wouldn’t be fair to you.”

“Wouldn’t be fair to you either if I kept you in a cage, would it.” Bucky says, and it’s not a question. He straightens up, only to look at him in a way that makes Steve feel older than he is. Somewhere on the roads of Europe, Bucky has stopped looking at him like he’s the little guy from Brooklyn, is looking at him like he really is the bigger guy that he has become and that he’s letting go.

Later, when Bucky is asleep against him, Steve murmurs endless apologies when no one can hear him. For the first time, he starts to doubt his mother’s words. What good can a gift be if it hurts when it loves?

 

Turns out Bucky and Peggy find an agreement behind his back without mentioning a word to him. He can tell in the way Bucky doesn’t tense up when Peggy and Steve smile at each other above a map full of pins and Hydra bases, in the way Peggy doesn’t look away when Bucky and Steve look at each other and communicate with a language that doesn’t need words.

He wants to ask if they would have preferred a normal soulmate instead of him, who keeps ruining everything even with a super soldier serum coursing through his veins, but he can’t bring himself to.

_(“That’s what we get for falling for a man that’s too good for the likes of us,” Bucky tells Peggy when he isn’t here.)_

 

He should have seen this coming. Bucky and Peggy don’t take too long to team up against him: one day, they both approach him, slide their hands underneath the sleeves of his dress uniform to touch his wrists at the same time. Steve can’t stop grinning for the rest of the day, to the point Colonel Phillips ask him with a deadpan voice if he’s counting on kicking the Nazis’ asses with hugs and kisses. 

(Colonel Phillips has a mark he doesn’t speak about, a small general insignia partially hidden behind Howard’s shield.)

 

“What color is yours?” He asks Peggy later when she looks at Steve’s frameless compass arrows on his left arm, _hers_. He can’t stop looking at her lips, a bright red that echoes on his skin, shades of colors he couldn’t see before, but it’s a different one than Bucky who fuses with him.

“Blue, like the sky of a bright night,” she smiles.

_(Apparently, Steve’s mark on Bucky’s skin is the same shade, nothing to do with the sea. It’s just that Bucky sucks at describing things._

_“Not everyone can look at the world and see beauty in every little thing like you, Rogers. It’s blue like your dumb eyes, now get off my back and stop laughing at me.”)_

When he takes off his dirty, blood covered uniform, he finally looks at himself and likes what he sees. His new body is like the perfect oil canvas he couldn’t afford but loved to look at through the shop windows, imagining what he could paint with it. He leads his team with a closed fist, each finger has a purpose and brings him one step forward. Bucky’s mark is faint but pulsing with life, fuses with him, while Peggy’s compass is just like those roses with bright colors that puts the rest of the boring green grass to shame, with thorns to ward off the unsuspecting.

Fitting, he thinks. He can’t think of a point in his life where Bucky wasn’t there, a part of him, while Peggy stands out and with those sharp eyes of her, tells him where to go next.

 

Bucky and Peggy’s lines join up at the center of his collarbone now.

 

**iii.**

 

Steve’s right arm grows cold, empty, a dead weight at his side, like the snow of the Alps followed him and crawled under his skin, never melting.

He hates himself, for he knows that’s what he’s going to do to Peggy. She’s stronger than him still, he might hear her sobs on the other side of the radio, but he knows she’ll pull through.

But, _“this is my choice,”_ and relief courses through his veins as he knows he can end that imperfect existence of his, cursed to love many but not able to give enough to each of them. It’ll stop hurting, for everyone.

 

It’s so cold.

 

Let it end.

 

(It never does.)

 

(The ice melts and regrows around his right arm, sometimes.)

 

He wakes up and there’s nothing left for him.

 

**iv.**

 

Once he’s done running through a very alien looking Time Square, he’s given a change of clothes. He takes off the SSR branded ones and when he looks at himself in the mirror, he lets out an hysterical laugh until the mirror shatters under his grip.

He doesn’t cry though. His arms speak for him, so does his hand and leg. It’s all grey, grey, grey. He hides underneath layers of clothes that are as outdated as he is.

 

He feels a glimmer of hope when he fights with the Avengers in the devastated streets of New York. He has a team around him again, one that has his back and maybe he can trust. Bruce has the same gentleness as Gabe while Clint has Jim’s mischievousness, and Thor could be an alien Dum-Dum Dugan who traded a mustache and a bowler hat for longer hair and a hammer.

Yet they drift apart as easily as they have come together and his remaining unmarked hand stays as such. They’re not really a team then, until Stark brings them together again with an obnoxious phone call and a promise of a place to stay in his big, ugly tower if they ever need it.

 

“I was told about that, but seeing it with my own eyes, it’s something else.”

So, loving to hear the sound of their own voices is a Stark trait, it seems.

Under the summer heat, especially at the top of Stark’s tower and with a metabolism like his, Steve can’t exactly keep pretenses of being cold and has to take a few layers off. He’s very much aware of their eyes on him, _strangers’_ eyes to him still, while he lays himself bare for everyone to see.

“Pretty morbid sight though, I gotta say,” Stark adds at the colourless soulmarks. Steve’s fist tightens underneath his thigh. He remembers Howard’s scientific jabs that lacked sympathy and tact, overwhelmed by curiosity, so he tries not to let it get to him, but it’s hard to stay patient with a Stark.

“No one asked you to comment on it, Stark,” Steve lets out dryly, and he thinks Romanoff’s heel finds Stark’s foot, so the conversation ends there.

All six of them stay a bit for a few months, but nothing much comes out of it. They’re all pretty much busy with something else, their own lives. Steve is mostly busy with a life he never had, walking through the streets of New York, trying to picture how it used to be, also going through old files after old files. SHIELD wants him in Washington within a year. He has nothing much left in New York - if only his Brooklyn old neighbors could hear him now: he leaves it behind, but the hope in his chest in the shape of the Avengers doesn’t exactly die out either. The reason for that is faint, very much so because he hadn’t realized it was there until he was done unpacking. ( _It’s just a bag of two sets of modern clothes, some pencils and paper sheets, his dress uniform and medals. That’s all he has.)_ Right at the center of his chest whirls a white storm just like he has seen on those satellic maps; he can barely see it, but it’s in the shape of an arc reactor and at the exact right place.

There’s also a lightning strike that runs alongside the length of his spine, an actual arrow on his shoulder, a greenish handprint on his hip. Even his enhanced eyes can barely discern it, but it’s all there. In his new apartment in DC filled with vinyl records and old photographs, he chuckles in the silence. They didn’t fill his other hand, perhaps because they’re not meant to bond on a battlefield, but maybe beyond. There’s no spider claw, he notices.

 

Visiting Peggy makes his skin itch. The colors come and go as she cries over and over that he’s back and alive and he tells her he always keeps his promises, like a broken record that can’t bring itself to stop hurting. At least he’s feeling something.

 

His first _real_ mark of the twenty-first century is a pair of giant blue, red and white wings on his back, all for the lone jogger on his right. He takes happiness where he can; in this case, it’s in the size of them, not that far from Bucky’s and Peggy’s. For the first time in two years, Steve starts to feel like the forties, _home_ , aren’t so far after all, when he jokes around with Sam Wilson, the first person who asks him what makes him happy.

 

DC - or perhaps this century itself - becomes a second home, he thinks, because his other leg mirrors the Brooklyn one. Patterns for the Smithsonian guard who pretends he doesn’t recognize the man whose face is plastered all over the display walls, the little old lady a few doors away who is probably his age, which explains why he loves her so much. Those kids who are his actual age at the local college with colorful hairstyles and demonstration signs who teach him about words and food he would have never dreamt of before. That young woman holding an antiquity shop filled with objects born after him. A few soldiers at the VA center he talks to sometimes, even though he feels like his experience doesn’t quite hold up to their sacrifices. Rebecca Barnes again, who’s still alive and kicking, who burst into tears because at least one of her boys finally came home.

It’s not quite like Brooklyn because his legacy is a burden on his shoulders he can’t exactly put aside, but he’s starting to like it.

 

He starts missions with Romanoff, still without any mark for her. He hides the rest of the Avengers out of courtesy and dismay because he doesn’t want her to feel left out, though she probably already knows she doesn’t really have a place anywhere, she just slides through any group, lingers, and pretends to be with them.

His STRIKE team probably thinks he’s crazy because he’s deep undercover for a few months for SHIELD when he hears about the Mandarin and aliens in London. The reports are uncertain about Iron Man and Thor’s survival. Yet his only answer is a disbelieving laugh: he can still feel them on his skin, he’s not worried.

Said team never gets a place on his limbs. He leads them but never tries to get close to them. _(“Always follow what your heart tells you, sweetheart,” are her mother’s words on her deathbed. He can’t bring himself to trust them.)_

Maybe it’s a twenty-first century thing and he truly can’t force his way in, not in a time that doesn’t want him. But then Hydra is very much a twenty-first century thing and he itches for a fight, grateful he doesn’t have to smash the skull of someone who’s on his skin with his shield.

 

But then, his shield and his fist collide with a stranger that wears Bucky’s face and his right arm actually _burns_ , all the way to his heart.

 

“Do you trust me?” Natasha asks with a trembling voice. She eyes the spots of his bare skin that still don’t have her.

“I do now.”

On the left side of his neck, right before her bewildered eyes, intricate lines slowly trace themselves without any pen until they touch his jaw. It’s methodical, precise, and like a real spider doing the job, but far more deadly.

“Typical,” she mocks the shape of the burgundy spider web when she shakes herself out of her shock, but her lips don’t quite reach her eyes. They only holds frightful tears that won’t spill. She’s scared of him, she’s always been, he realizes. He isn’t quite sure why, he’s the one who’s always been a bit scared of what people could do to someone like him, wearing his heart on his sleeve, quite literally.

“Is it though?” He smiles earnestly, which he finds is the best counter to Natasha’s cynicism. Natasha’s mark is a different one. It’s heavier, like the weight of a hand that is about to snap his neck and he remembers fairy tales about enemies bound forever. He knows he shouldn’t trust a black widow with anything, especially his life and his heart. Yet the lines of the web are soft, they kind of look like the streaks of his charcoal when he puts his heart out on paper, so he doesn’t care.

She is one of his now.

 

Every time Bucky punches him, like an old machine waiting for its lever to be pulled, the lines of his right arm come back to life.

 

Sam says he might not be the kind to save, but Steve is going to chase after him all the same: Bucky’s intricate design is filled with specks of colors again. It’s always moving, never staying quite the same every day they spend running around the world. Some parts light up with blue and red, then purple and then green and even white, then they fade to grey again. It starts with sparkles, but day after day, the colors drift more and more towards the same shades and starts to join and touch. He must be quite the sight, both of his arms flicker with the disloyal memories of the two most important people in his life that quite don’t remember him. He chooses to be optimistic about it, at least for one of them.

Steve knows Bucky will come home, just like that.

 

Avengers business doesn’t stop: around a party table and a hammer, he decides to roll up his sleeves, tell them about that strange case of his.

They don’t match with him, of course. Tony and Pepper are a perfect match for each other. Clint chokes on his beer when he says with a smirk he has an arrow somewhere on his back, but Clint just has ‘someone else’. Natasha, he knows already she doesn’t have anyone. Bruce has a woman, he can’t quite seem to comprehend why Steve of all people would have him - they’re polar opposites, a failed serum and the only success of it. Steve doesn’t really care, he likes the Hulk and can feel Bruce’s handprint change and grow in size when the Other Guy is here. Bruce, all nerves and hunched shoulders, actually straightens and smiles, looking at him right in the eyes.

Apparently, Asgardians don’t have soulmates at all. Some humans are like that, of course, but Steve is so used to bathe in the concept that it’s unnerving to say the least: he stands next to Thor and realizes how vulnerable he is, while nothing seems to touch Thor. He feels envious for a moment, to live a life without having people scrutinize him like he’s some kind of artwork on display except it’s not art, _it’s his soul and his life_ that people are looking at.

Thor says it’s a battle scar. He seems convinced of that fact himself, so Steve doesn’t push. But his artist eyes spot the curve of a snake tail behind Thor’s ear and he knows better.

Soulmates can be anything, he can vouch for that. Even a lost brother from another realm.

“I am honored, Steven, to have such a place in your heart, and to follow you into battle. Only someone like you is able to lead us,” Thor tells him with a heavy hand on his shoulder when he finally shows him the lightning on his back, his fingertips reaching the drawing. It’s a sensation Steve has missed dearly. The shape of it is sharper now _(he felt it, like electric charges when he brushed his hands against Mjölnir)_ , an interesting shade of yellow like his hair. Kind of like Bucky’s, it merges with him perfectly.

Tony, because his brain belongs to him, breaks the moment by joking about something called He-Man and long lost brothers that neither Steve nor Thor quite get. Steve huffs, he can spot a jealous man when he sees one. A jealous Stark _whines_ like a child while pretending he’s not hurting. Fortunately, Steve is also quite gifted at handling the family line and shutting them up: he stands up, opens his shirt and the mirrored sight of his own arc reactor on someone else’s chest leaves Tony with his mouth agape for at least twenty seconds, which is quite frankly a long time for Tony.

 _(“Why is it so_ big _?” Tony asks one day when he’s done running away._ And so close to your heart _, he doesn’t add._

_Steve shrugs. Instead, he shows Howard’s shield on his palm, so tiny and grey compared to Tony’s mark, glowing, huge, and full of life.)_

When he puts back his shirt in place, he winks at Natasha. There’s an eyepatch clinging to her web, hiding behind it like Colonel Phillips’ stars behind Howard’s shield.

 

“You’re a fool, captain, to show so much of yourself to your enemies,” hisses a Hydra high ranked operative whose name he forgot. It doesn’t really matter; he has a skull insignia over his heart, it’s enough of a target in Steve’s eyes.

Next thing Steve knows, there’s a syringe embedded in his bicep, his cowl is gone and a dozen soldiers are trying to bring him down. He cracks a few skulls and legs against the concrete walls of the Hydra base until a hand manages to get a hold over his neck and _squeezes_ . It’s not enough to choke him, he’s sturdier than that, but it’s enough to just _twist_ the skin that belongs to Natasha’s dark red web. That’s the thing that brings him on his knees.

A knife finds its way in his spine too, maybe. He isn’t too sure.

He struggles and blinks - maybe for longer than a second, because when he opens his eyes again, it’s to see the flash of a blade flying in the agent’s chest, followed by a blast and lightning. Far ahead, there’s a roar that shakes the depths of the base, rapidly coming closer.

He tries to say something but chokes on it.

“Hush, Cap, or the big guy is going to bring this whole place down on us. Just relax for our survival, will you,” Clint’s voice reaches him. So, Steve does the most tactical thing: he passes out from the chemicals they’ve put in his veins.

Back in the tower, he isn’t impervious to the fact that no one really mentions how he literally got down to the point that the Hulk wouldn’t let go of his passed out form - so he’s been told - until the big guy allowed Thor to carry him back during the debrief. Or that the base got reduced into tinier pieces that the previous ones.

“Why the long face, Cap?” Tony finally humors him, his feet on the glass table with a bag of -- Steve didn’t really know what that was. More sugar than he’s probably ever had during the entire Great Depression for sure.

Steve straightens up to take a look at his team. Something is off putting in the way they hold each other. He can see it, the way Natasha is tilting her head so the left side of her neck is protected. Next to him, Thor seems relaxed, but every now and then he stretches his arms and back, like there’s an itch behind he can’t get rid off.

“We can’t exactly have you all losing track of the objective every time I take a hit in a bad spot,” he finally lets out. “Especially if the Hulk is going to go rogue like that again. No offense, Bruce,” he adds, but Bruce just shrugs. The Hulk likes Steve the most apparently and Steve treats him with gentleness that isn’t familiar for him.

“I’ll stop you right there, Captain Disapproval. I’m too old to hear about whatever bullshit has bloomed in that narrow blond head of yours,” Tony quickly interrupts him. “No, seriously, I’m certainly not getting younger by sitting here listening to that,” he adds when Natasha rolls her eyes.

“Tony--”

“So what, you decided to show off to all of us by proving that there indeed exists a perfect man and we certainly are not worthy of him - dick move, by the way. Makes me look bad,” Tony continues.

“Just watch your six better, it’s not that complicated,” Clint says. Unhelpfully.

“Listen--”

“Steve,” Natasha’s voice rings, clear and distinct enough to stop him. “It’s pointless to fight this one.”

Thor has been quiet the entire debrief, struggling with the idea of a very persistent and feeble liability fighting at his side, although it’s already overthrown by the desire to get stronger in order to protect it. He nods at Steve. Unstoppable force, meet immovable object.

“The Hulk wouldn’t really approve anyway,” Bruce adds with a fake innocence and a shrug, and that’s the end of that specific argument.

Consequences of that incident remain though. Steve’s tactical eyes spot it in the way they fight. Tony flies ahead of him regardless of his plan and orders, but his armor blocks hits that should have gone straight to his chest. Thor has his back in every sense of the word, and they’re so in sync both in and outside of battle that his heart and spine aches with Bucky in mind. The Hulk swipes him off his feet, grabbing him by the side where Bruce’s mark lays, to cover him from gunshots and bombshells, trapping him inside the giant’s hands. Clint’s arrows brush past his shoulders - too close, and he can hear Clint’s amused smirk through the comm links.

He doesn’t want to admit it, but they work better now. Like one single unit.

And Natasha?

“You really are a fool,” Natasha says while she pushes at his face, forcing him to lay down his head in her lap for the night. All protests that his wounds have healed already die in his throat when she absentmindedly drums her fingers on her mark, as if she still doesn’t believe it belongs there.

“I felt it, when they choked you. So did Thor when they stabbed his mark. Nearly got myself killed when it happened. I shouldn’t be able to, we don’t carry you like you carry us, it’s all one-sided, so…” Above him, her voice shakes. He decides to stay silent. He knows it well enough.

“You really are a bad influence,” she laughs. Steve smiles back: the last time someone told him that, Captain America didn’t exist.

 

Tony likes to poke at his chest every now and then until Steve’s glare becomes a full “America is disappointed in you” frown, as he likes to call it. Thor’s fingers travel near his lower back when they walk next to each other. Bruce and Clint pretend there’s nothing underneath his clothes. Natasha, surprisingly, follows Tony’s example and flicks her fingers at his neck when he expects it the least.

It’s all comforting touches. Selfishly, he thinks of Bucky and Peggy and wishes they’d touch their marks entirely, take them all in, because they’re all he has and he belongs to them.

_(But they have other things, don’t they?_

_He’s forcing his way through their lives and this century, greedily forcing them to feel a connection to him when they didn’t bear him in the first place.)_

“Wow,” Sam chokes out when he finally shows him what his mark looks like.

“They’re, wow, huge,” he chuckles. “Can I, can I touch it?” He asks after a moment and Steve tries not to look too eager when he nods, and he nearly collapses upon feeling _something_ again, because someone is filling the bottomless pit in his soul again, at long last.

 

“Doesn’t it hurt, to have no one else with your mark while you have all of us?” Natasha asks him before Ultron starts to crack at everything he has.

“No,” he answers with a smile. “I’m not very good with words. It tells people how much I value them right away.” And he is actually starting to believe it himself. He takes the sight of his bickering team, his new team, thinks of Bucky and Peggy who would have preferred a normal soulmate, and maybe being a broken case isn’t so bad after all.

 _Yes_ , he thinks, because he’s terrified they don’t have a place for him in this strange, new world.

“Sounds like a dangerous way to live,” she whispers, used to live behind a veil so thick even she can’t tell her own real feelings. She clears her throat. “You used to scare me, you know. You still do. Your body, it’s like your own honesty just decided to make itself visible. And that’s scary to me.”

He loves her even more as she reveals herself to him, bits by bits. Her web actually shimmers on the side of his neck. She then throws a pillow from the couch at his face.

“You better hide that, Rogers. I don’t want you to blow my cover just because you decided to be the only sincere man on this goddamn planet.”

She is smiling though, so Steve throws back the pillow and snickers. “Nope, not gonna do that.” All with a Brooklyn accent, like at home.

“We got you, Steve,” she hums a lullaby with a language of sharp sounds he understands a bit, until he falls asleep against her that night. Before he’s lost to the world, he could have sworn his marks sang back in harmony.

 

When he wakes up from a dream of a war that is finally over and a life that could have been his, there are reddish waves across his stomach, near his mother’s sparrow. Later, he will realize that his ma had looked at him like he looks at Wanda, and apologizes to her that he doesn’t bear her brother on him.

Perhaps if he had, he could have saved him for her.

 

Peggy dies. He doesn’t need a text from her niece, he can feel his arm finally grow cold just like the other one did in 1945. It takes all his strength not to collapse in the conference room amongst the other Avengers.

He does later on Sam’s shoulders whose mark has been empty since his wingman fell from the sky, while Wanda whispers strange spells in his ears to soothe him.

 

“I can feel it,” Wanda tells him one day in the compound’s kitchen.

Wanda is all quick side looks and making herself as small as possible. Gone is the pain turned into unleashed anger when he first met her, replaced by guilt among other things. It’s a bit better when Steve stands next to her, a reliable wall she can lean on when he looks at her dead in the eye without fear unlike everyone else.

“What?”

“The bareness inside of you.” She nods to his chest, hands wrapped around a cup of tea that she hunches over, trying to catch all of its fuming warmth.

“Well I’d appreciate if you didn’t pry in it,” Steve’s voice snaps, harsher than intended. He sighs, passes a hand over his face. “Sorry, it’s just… It’s a sore subject.”

Wanda smiles painstakingly. “It’s alright. I can’t blame people for being wary of me, I can’t exactly control it. People, they… They project so much without barriers because there’s usually no one on the other end to answer and read them. I try not to look, but you… It’s all over the place and it’s hard to ignore, frankly.”

“I’m sorry, Wanda.” There isn’t much else to say. Sorry for the difficult life Hydra has forced her in, sorry for making her feel so much of the silent, but persistent ache in his lungs and chest he feels every single day of his long life.

She huffs and nods tearfully. “It’s okay.” Not that it is.

“I can’t stretch it completely to close it, but I can try to fill it a bit,” she adds after a few minutes of silence, biting her lip and looking down at her shoes, perhaps in the hope that Steve won’t acknowledge her.

Steve perks up at that. How great it would be, to finally _understand_ the pure bliss on Tony and Pepper’s faces when they close the gap between each other. The perfect match, without anyone like him wanting more and leaving his own people feeling like they’re not enough.

But this isn’t about him, he realizes as he looks at Wanda’s hesitance. He sighs, puts his pen away from the reports Rhodey (whose mark is just a bit below Tony’s) had sent him for approval, and leans over the counter from his bar stool. He questions Wanda with a stare when he holds out his hand, and she gives hers to him, completely trusting, trying over and over to meet his eyes.

“Alright, but not with your magic,” he finally says as he settles her hand over his heart. The waves of his stomach seem to move at the pace of the tide over his stomach. “Just be there.”

Wanda blinks. Clearly, it wasn’t what she was expecting. Her fingers gently move across the softness of his shirt, just like the back and forths of his mother’s hand over his hair about a hundred years ago or so.

“I could do more,” she pleads in a whisper while a few tears spill down her cheeks.

“It’s more than enough.” He smiles and says around a sob he manages to keep quiet and undetectable. Wanda doesn’t point out his own tears, and how she can feel his heart is begging her to use her magic.

 _He’s_ begging her not to. This isn’t about him, and Wanda needs to know that she’s more than just her magic.

“For what it’s worth, I know a little about how it feels,” she confides in his arms later.

Steve isn’t quite sure. Losing a twin is a different kind of loss than all the ones he’s ever lived through, one greater than everything.

“I wish I could erase it from my skin,” she half growls, half whispers, and the glass nearby shakes on the surface of the table.

“It’ll only make things worse, believe me.”

There was only one time his mother had yelled at him. The old neighbors hadn’t suspected a thing when he stole cigarettes from them, because he just wanted to make it _stop._ But burning his marks had made things much worse _inside_. The serum had healed it all, although when it got empty twelve years and seventy more later, he wasn’t too sure if it was a blessing or a curse.

What he does know however, is that the morbid thoughts about whether or not the serum could make his limbs regrow like a lizard (Tony’s words, not his), in a way that may set him free, should remain what they are. Just thoughts.

“Alright,” Wanda says shakily against him, painfully aware of what is inside his head.

 

In Siberia, from the tips of his fingers to his core, Steve’s body is aflame and he doesn’t know how to stop it.

 

“I’m not him.” Bucky winces as he eyes Steve’s bare arm in Wakanda.

They don’t speak much of Bucky’s lost arm, Steve’s lost mark. Just once, in the Quinjet after Siberia, Bucky told him the loss of his limb didn’t hurt as much as losing Steve’s star. Perhaps that’s why it was easy for Hydra to make him forget why the crack in his heart hurt so much.

Indeed, the colors on Steve’s skin are still a bit mismatched, and they never reach the shame shade of blue Bucky’s fingertips brushed over in the slums of Brooklyn or around a night camp in a warzone in Austria.

“Maybe,” Steve answers. He gets up and with a gentle grip he didn’t know he was still capable of, steers Bucky’s flesh hand towards his skin. “But it’s still blue. That’s enough for me.”

Bucky’s touch hasn’t changed when he rediscovers who he is through Steve. Bucky grins and laughs and cries. He’s coming home, at last.

It’s also the first time Steve really cries in this new century despite being awake for years. He wants to touch Bucky, wants to touch himself on Bucky’s skin, except it’s gone forever in a snow-covered ravine. Still, he takes what he has: he has Bucky within his grasp, _Bucky_ is holding him against him again even with one arm. Their foreheads touch, their noses brush against each other. It’s stupid, but they smile and giggle like the teenagers hiding behind the locked door of their apartment they used to be.

His arm is on fire; it makes up for the frozen core on his chest.

 

(Bucky ponders over a scar above his elbow that the serum has erased from his skin. Steve tries not to show how much it means that it wasn’t erased from Bucky’s broken pieces of memories.

“You know how the kids get once they reach the teenage years. One got a hold of a knife to play adult and I pissed him off. Things escalated very quickly after that,” Steve explains. He doesn’t explain that it’s the very first time Bucky absolutely lost it when he came home, before he’s calm enough to circle his fingers around Steve’s thin arm, pressing at the wound until the latter hurts less than Bucky’s grip.

“I felt it, Steve,” is the only thing he had managed to say, amongst many other things.)

 

(T’Challa’s eyes shine with esteem and relief when Steve tells him about a tiger claw somewhere around his thigh.)

 

When he’s selfish - _he always is_ , he hurt Peggy and Bucky back in the war for wanting them both, he hurts both of his teams by making his love visible and they can’t return it in the same glory, he brought the team to an end now - he asks for Sam and Natasha to hold him when they’re on the run.

It doesn’t do anything for them, he apologizes over and over for that while he’s taking it everything they have to offer by force, because he can’t quite bear the hole in his heart anymore like he used to. He’s tired of hurting, and quite deaf to their reassurances that it’s okay, he can ask for whatever he wants, he deserves that much.

(He doesn’t. He thinks of Tony, Rhodey, Scott, Clint, Wanda, Sam, Natasha and how he keeps destroying everything because he loves too much.)

 

**v.**

 

“Steve…?”

There’s still a bit of that Catholic Irish faith left in him, and it wonders if God chose him to be his personal canvas and paint all of this ink on him, just to laugh at him as he keeps losing, over and over and over and over.

Everything turns to dust. His own legs can’t bear his weight anymore because he’s losing again, again, again, everything all at once. Maybe it’s the combined emptiness of Bucky and Sam, the biggest marks over his frame, or Wanda’s next to his mother’s, or T’Challa’s, or even maybe all the people that haven’t carved his skin yet but still exist out there and fade away, but he doesn’t even realize it’s Thor who carries him back to the Wakandan palace.

“A warrior that loves too much is a curse,” someone says.

Natasha’s hand caresses his forehead when it becomes too much to process, hushes him to close his eyes and listen to her voice, focus on his neck.

Steven Rogers is known as the best soldier of his home planet, so why does he keep losing?

 

Through the need to rip his own limbs apart until he can’t feel the unbearable weight on them, it dawns on him that Tony’s core is still alive. It flickers, but it’s still there among the grey and the unliving and Steve quietens another sob in his private room in the Avengers compound. He doesn’t want to hope, not anymore, not again, he doesn’t want to cling onto a tiny bit of life that might be gone soon enough.

It’s been weeks now. He wears turtlenecks and long-sleeved shirts, sometimes stays in his battle uniform even though there’s nothing left to fight, so he can have an excuse to wear gloves in the summer heat and hide his hands. The ones that are left don’t say anything when they look at him and the sweat clinging to his body. After all, the heat is easier to bear than the loss.

Still, when Pepper gets here, he tracks down some of Sam’s shirts - he was never very good at managing his emotions and his anger, so he had burnt all of his - and lets the first few buttons open. Her own mark is still alive as well, but when she spots the top of Tony’s core on him, still white and pulsing, she cries and cries and _cries,_ resting her forehead against his chest right where Tony is. She needs that proof that maybe Tony is still alive out there, as if her own mark isn’t enough to convince her.

(In the very center of Tony’s core, there are a few sparkles now, for her.)

Steve keeps wearing shirts. It’s tearing him apart to spot pity in everyone’s eyes when they look at his dead arms, dead back, dead fingers, dead everything, but Pepper looks at him with hope and gratitude. It’s easier to grieve that way.

 

Tony takes one look at him as Steve supports him inside, and all his anger and frustration built over the past two years vanish. Instead, he reaches out for Pepper, feels his mark on her hip while she searches for her own on his.

There’s no one left that matches with Steve, no one left that can really fill the ever growing hole in his heart, so Tony just says, “I’m sorry, I failed you,” and Steve can only answer, “So did I.” 

Steve stops hoping altogether now, even when there are promises of hunting down Thanos and bringing them back. The ones that board inside the spaceship take one worried look at him. This quest is much more personal for him, it seems. It also seems he was right not to hope, in the end.

 

Over the years, he wonders if Erskine really intended for his greatest creation to never be able to die from anything, even against their will. He feels like a walking ghost, one that can never quite move on. He also wears his marks like battle scars now, shows them to everyone and builds himself as a beacon of hope. That’s what Captain America is after all, as he reminds everyone in the streets, in the compound, in his counselling group, that they can always bounce back and move on because no one is going to lose as much as he did.

Steve Rogers doesn’t really exist anymore: that’s fine by him.

 

“Does it get easier?” Okoye asks him through the holographic comm link they’ve established, after a few minutes of lingering when the rest had already vanished.

Her voice is quiet, like confessing a weakness she didn’t even want to admit to herself. It’s the voice of someone who isn’t used to thinking about themselves, for they have something far more important to follow, Steve notes. Maybe they have more in common than he expected.

Steve is tempted to put on his captain voice - or perhaps it’s the other way around; he hasn’t put down the metaphorical uniform in a while. But Okoye’s eyes are always piercing and he’s pretty sure she’d be capable of stabbing him with a holographic lance.

Instead, he gives a pathetic excuse of a smile. “No, it doesn’t.” His words carry the long years he’s been alive when perhaps he shouldn’t have made it this far.

A heavy silence.

“I thank you for your honesty, Captain Rogers.” A nod, and she’s gone.

 

Nebula and Rocket - a goddamn raccoon _(“There’s room for the entire universe in that big heart of yours, Steven Grant Rogers,” his mother laughed)_ \- find a place within the curve of his lower back. It’s a slow kind of carving burn, taking a few years, but once it’s done and he takes a look, he lets out a chuckle that mingles with a sob.

He shows them one late night where they stay at the compound, too exhausted to go back to the stars right away. Both of them are perhaps a bit too inebriated to comprehend the sight of his own body, but in the way Nebula’s breath quickens - _restrained, quiet, scared_ of immediate pain at any expression she might make - and Rocket’s rare silence, he knows they see enough.

They’re like a solar system on his skin, a bunch of seven circles that intertwine with each other. However, only two of them have a dot. Right where the circles are supposed to cross paths, it’s faded out, never quite closed. Instead, they seem to reach out to the air, trying to form a functional unit with people that aren’t there anymore.

“Perhaps it’ll get completed later,” he laughs half heartedly and Nebula actually snarls. Rocket shrugs, always trying to look nonchalant; they’ll take hope wherever they can, even if it’s a stupid tiny painting on a used-to-be-stranger’s body.

 

Tony rarely comes to the compound. No one really does, it’s more like all the deserted, hollow cities out there. Natasha keeps it running, Steve tries to help but she brushes him away, pretexting he’s suffered enough leading them, she can take up the mantle for a moment.

Tony probably hates being here now, Steve realizes quickly, because the man immediately comes to get him and leaves as quickly as he had come.

“I, huh… Well, there’s no easy way to word this. I’m bored, you know, saving the Earth was my thing, I failed majestically at that, I know, I’m amazing like that,” Tony keeps going despite Steve’s winces. “But well, now that I don’t have that to do, I tinker with stuff, and I thought, you’re an artist. Don’t ask me how I know that, I just know, a little bird called my asshole of a father told me. About a hundred times. Anyway, take this and don’t try to thank me with those puppy eyes of yours, Rogers, I don’t need it, I’m leaving,” he finishes, forcing a little device in Steve’s hands.

He immediately turns around and leaves, not before stopping in his steps to add above his shoulder: “You’re welcome to stop by if you don’t pronounce the A word or the T word. I’m sure Morgan would be delighted to finally meet Uncle Steve.”

The device is some kind of modified smartphone, he thinks at first, before he taps it. Once he does, the lights inside the room dims to let an hologram flow over his head. At the top, he can read _“Drawing tablet in holograms, StarkPad Inc. - first of the kind, I’m a genius and you know it, Rogers”_.

Steve smiles, blinks back a few tears stinging and pickling his eyes when he taps a few more buttons until a silhouette of his own body in a 3D render stands before him. He has tried drawing in this century. He doesn’t enjoy the digital techniques much, he enjoys an old school sketchbook way more. Yet, a sketchbook doesn’t quite gift him with a perfect sight of his own body, no matter how good he is at drawing three dimensional figures. Now, he can circle around it, paints over spots he would need to draw another figure for.

He grabs a non-existing paint brush among the many options he has to offer, ignores the little note at the top of the toolbox that says _“you better thank me for this, Rogers, I don’t know shit about art, I had to do actual research”_ and starts to work.

He doesn’t quite realize he’s smiling until a few hours, when he’s lost himself in his drawing like he used to in his Brooklyn apartment, oblivious to Bucky’s kicks in his shins when he tried to get his attention.

Steve closes his eyes, breathes in. Remembers and thanks for once his perfected memory and senses that can never forget anything, and paints, draws, actually laughs when the holographic charcoal clings to his fingers like the real deal.

He’s painting his life, imagines a shade for Erskine, invents different shades of white light for Tony that wraps around Pepper, mixes Bruce and The Hulk until it’s only one shape, intertwines Wanda and his mother (he actually has to take a break after this one), gives Thor’s lightning less of a warrior edge and more of the shape of a brother and a friend. He imagines the rest of Nebula and Rocket’s family after the stories they’ve told him. He doesn’t touch Natasha’s brushed lines of her web, they’re already perfect as they are.

Resuscitates an ancient Brooklyn until it’s one with Washington. Abstract scratches and streaks until, with his eyes that can decipher them, a Smithsonian guard meets sweet Mrs Werbiński around a cup of tea. Poor kids from the slums run around teenagers with flags and protest signs, that young lady he bought all of his vinyl records from at the antiquity shop enthusiastically listening to Mr Veloso’s stories of things that are now closer to being two hundred years old than just one hundred.

He fills in the void the serum has left between the lines, because it never felt quite right after all.

He paints Peggy and Bucky and Sam in all of their colorful glory last, and allow himself to grieve as he slides Tony’s little pad in his breast pocket.

 

He visits Tony almost every month after that. The first time he steps inside his wooden house, he weeps for the first time in forever, hugs Tony and whispers an heartfelt “thank you” in his ear.

“I said don’t thank me, Rogers, are those super soldier ears of yours going deaf?” Tony brushes aside his words as he welcomes him inside. Steve isn't blind to how Tony's hand lingers a bit more over his mark, telling him  _“I'm still here”_ without words, in a very Tony way.

After dinner, on his chest, Maguna outlines her father’s core and her mother rests inside their embrace.

 

(He hadn’t even realized that Scott’s trail of dots that travels alongside his hip opposite of Bruce wasn’t dead, because it’s a beautiful shade of grey he hasn’t quite managed to paint yet.)

It’s that trail that brings hope he doesn’t want to grasp quite yet; it’s a pleasant sting on his skin.

 

**vi.**

 

In 1970, his right arm stays dead, even when he looks at Peggy, so he mourns once again - _story of his life,_ he thinks bitterly - and moves on.

He doesn’t tell Tony as they sneak around that he just wants to drop right there and never move again because he feels as cold and empty as he did in that damn mangled train in 1945, because they have to keep going. He blinks back the tears that he knows aren’t _Peggy’s_ and the weight in his throat and stomach, grabs the Pym particles to go back to his time and leave Peggy behind once again.

Perhaps he shut it down in a corner of his mind - he’s pretty gifted at denial - but when he steps out of the portal, he realizes Natasha’s web itched the entire time until it fades to grey. It’s a different kind of loss that he’s ever experienced before and he wonders why he’s always the one that keeps living.

 

They all eye him before Bruce puts on the gauntlet: he’ll be the first one to know if it worked.

He does collapse. He doesn’t really know if it’s because of the revival of everyone he loves, or just Thanos’ bomb shells. After that, there really isn’t any time to wonder if it did work.

 

Mjölnir responds to him as if it’s an extension of his already expanded soul. The moment he grabs it, it hums in his mind with excitement, practically shivering and hissing _“at long last, Star Bearer, we meet”_. On his back, through his own armor, Thor’s mark is glowing, sparks in the same way Thor’s eyes do when he summons lightning. It sends electricity through his body and the numerous proofs of his soul on it, brings back Sam’s wings to life as he can feel himself practically flying with power.

Later on, someone will tell him all of his marks were glowing, making him a beacon leading them through a battle for the universe.

_(“You have so much to give, Steve, and it’ll all outgrow tiny Brooklyn,” his mother had once said.)_

And then, _“on your left”_ , and once again, Steve’s body is set aflame. He grins through it, welcomes and embraces it, wields Mjölnir and passes his shield to Sam and Bucky, clings to the life burning through his skin and never lets go.

 

He knows without looking that Tony is gone. On his chest, Tony’s core flickers at the same pace as the real one, until it dies out, once and for all, leaving Morgan and Pepper alone with each other.

 

**vii.**

 

He steps out of the quantum portal with a grin and a repaired shield, without a hammer and Infinity Stones.

And also smaller.

“Fucking idiot punk,” Bucky huffs as he draws him closer. The man tightens his grip, then steps aside to let Sam embrace him. Steve’s wings flutter, then they actually feel like they’re going crazy when Steve hands him the shield on the edge of a lake. Sam breathes deeply when his hands touch the vibranium like he’s going to taint it.

“I guess that’s what the stars and stripes colour scheme you got me is for,” he finally says, his voice addled with a torrent of emotions. “Was that your intention from the start?”

“If you think I’m going to give my shield to the first slow jogger I pass, you’re absolutely nuts, Sam,” Steve laughs. Then, he quietens, grins in a way he hasn’t in a long time. “But it’s always been you. It can’t be anyone else.” He turns to glance behind him; a few feet behind, Bucky nods with a smirk and approval.

“Well, if one damn drawing on your back said so,” Sam jokes. He nudges him back, perhaps a tad too forcefully because it makes Steve stagger and yelp. Sam laughs out loud. “Forgot you’re just a twig now. Come on, go to him, you know you want to. Don’t waste your time with little poor me.”

“You take the majority of my back, Sam, I don’t think I can waste time on you.”

“...Well, at least I know the Captain America voice didn’t come with the super steroids.”

Sam is right though. Steve’s skin hungers, so close yet still so far from the one person left with his mark, his proof on the world. It doesn’t matter that it’s not there anymore, that he can’t quite touch it and shudder until he can feel whole. He had drawn a line on that a long time ago in the Alps in 1945, then over and over as Bucky came back but not quite, as Peggy finally left.

Bucky though, mark or not, is still standing. He looks at him as Steve walks to him with an expression he hasn’t seen in ten years and seventy more, where it was lost somewhere in Austria, or maybe Hungary, or England, or maybe it had died in Brooklyn. Its fire has started again though, and Bucky’s eyes flicker with love when he looks _down_ at little Stevie, just a kid from Brooklyn.

“Done with your stupidity? Took you quite a long time,” Bucky snickers when he stops a few inches away.

He has a feeling he’s not just talking about fighting wars for the past fifteen years or so of his waking life when Bucky kept telling him he _doesn’t have to_ fight, although it does feel both strange and unreal to lay down the weapons and sit on the grass of the peace he’s fought so long for.

No, it dawns on him that while he can discern a familiar ache in his back, a slight weight on his lungs that makes his throat sting with a constant wheeze in his mouth, senses muffled, not quite able to take in the sight of the nature around him or listen to it, he feels at peace in his body. Perhaps for the first time in his life. He sends an heartfelt apology to Erskine; ever the peak of humanity, it had never quite felt like it was his own.

Perhaps it should have been someone else to receive that gift, after all.

“All better now?” Bucky nods at him.

Steve looks down at himself, bathes in the familiar sight.

“Yeah. It finally is, I think.”

 

Bucky’s fingers shakes as he tears the layers of Steve’s clothes, one by one, letting them fall to the floor around their bare feet. Sam is in the room next door, and one day Steve will show him the canvas the years, the _world_ has drawn all over him, but for now, the moment is theirs. It’s always been him and Bucky, from the start.

“Ready?”

Steve breathes in, breathes out. “‘Course.”

“It’s not a fight, Stevie,” Bucky huffs.

He steers him towards the mirror in their room, gently grabs Steve’s wrists so they stop hiding the art of his lifetime. Steve can’t help but smile. A few marks may have been empty, and will stay that way now, but that infamous pit in his heart has stopped tearing itself on its edges, accepting the empty parts and content with what it has to fill the rest.

Whereas his Captain America body wore each mark next to one another, leaving bare skin between them, his new, old, _true_ body brings them all together. There’s not much of said bare skin left for them to see now. Everyone is linked to one another in some ways, lines that cross another, weave themselves around another, blend together until Steve is just a vessel for them to stand on and move forward. One half, the past; the other, his present.

It’s a map of his life and love.

He remembers his mother’s warmth and delight in her eyes when she looked down at him, remembers her words. She wasn’t quite correct, he’s not sure he is a gift. But he himself, he has a lot to give.

“So colorful,” Bucky breathes against his skin, holds him again like he did a century before. He had always matched the curve of Bucky’s chest, even with the serum, but it was never quite the same. He fits again in there, buries his face against him. Even with Bucky’s mark gone forever, he can tell they’re still one and the same.

“Jealous of all my soulmates, Miss Rogers?” Steve mocks.

“Colonel Phillips ain’t your soulmate, shut your mouth.” Bucky gently kicks him.

Steve snorts. “Maybe not, then.”

“And I’m not. Jealous, I mean. Perhaps I used to be, but not anymore. I’m more honored to have such a place of honor among all of these people,” Bucky adds, in the same tone that once said, _I’m not sure I’m worth all this, Steve._

Steve rests his forehead against Bucky’s arm, where his blue star used to be. Their hands find each other as Bucky traces his right arm’s line. Steve’s right hand remained empty in those hundred years, yet as he finally allows himself to rest and his fingers lodge themselves in Bucky’s, the mess of Bucky’s Brooklyn people, boats, streets, grows, until the last patch of Steve’s bare skin disappears.

It’s all mismatched at first glance, what’s drawn all over him. But they all fit together, each of them, somehow.

They’re all Steve’s people.

**Author's Note:**

> that's all for now folks! I'm thinking of expanding this universe I've built there with perhaps different characters' perspective as a counterpoint to steve's pov, or maybe some kind of mini sequel with steve, sam and bucky, but overall I'm pretty satisfied with how it ends, so here you have it
> 
> I also have two IW/Endgame fics in the making that are unrelated to this one, so stay tuned for that~
> 
> I would be delighted to hear about your thoughts on this fic if you've made it this far, kudos and comments are the fic writer's sustenance, and thank you for your time~
> 
> you can also find me on twitter [@vibraniiumstars](https://twitter.com/vibraniiumstars)


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